Lady Justice is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems. Her attributes are a blindfold, a balance, and a sword. The key attribute that stands out to me is the blindfold. Since the 16th century, Lady Justice has often been depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power or other status. Simply stated justice is supposed to be blind. However, justice tends to avoid equitable treatment when it comes to Black people. Lady Justice is a white woman. Is she a racist white woman?

July 5th, 2016, we all cringed in terror as we watched footage of Alton Sterling being murdered incold blood by the Baton Rouge police department. Similar to the feelings after the Rodney King footage and so many others in the last 25 years, we assumed since this atrocity was filmed that “justice” would prevail.However, on May 2nd, 2017 the decision was made that the police officers involved would not face federal charges. The Trump administration and Jeff Sessions have been under scrutiny about how they will deal with racially motivated state murders of Black people. How many times will local and federal departments blatantly show a complete disregard for black life and receive no repercussions? How long will we continue to put our faith in a system that was designed to oppress not liberate? Many people say the system is broken. We believe the system is working exactly how is was designed to operate. Alton Sterling was held down and shot unjustly by white police officers live on camera. He was not a threat to their safety. To deny he was murdered is to deny being human, and to deny his family justice is to admit black people have no worth as human beings to the government of this country.

Taking a look at some of the more popular cases of Black people murdered by police, none of them have been proven to be violent towards police. They were killed for walking in the street, making an illegal turn, speeding, alleged theft, possibly selling cigarettes, or just being Black. How can we have faith in a system that we watch destroy us daily? The voices of the youth can no longer be ignored if we will have actual progress. Seeing the lack of age diversity in some of these meetings show that a lot of these organizations are out of touch with the actual streets. They seem to be out of touch with the daily issues Black people in these inner-city neighborhoods face. If they aren’t out of touch they are just being hindered by the system itself. We follow every rule, join the system itself, and we are still oppressed and murdered by it. Those who are in a position to fight from with-in are limited due to the fact the system was designed to keep Black people in bondage. Black people are viewed as monsters in the eyes of law enforcement. It seems as if there have been orders sent down to kill Black people for any reason one can muster. The reasons are always the same, and the response from Lady Justice is always the same. It doesn’t matter if the person is unarmed, a child with a toy, armed with CD’s and DVD’s, in a wheelchair, or is on the ground being held by two other officers, if they are black they are a justified threat to the life of the officers. Lady Justice isn’t blind at all. She can see skin color very well. We stand with the family of Alton Sterling.

HandsUpUnitedis a collective of politically engaged minds building towards the liberation of oppressed Black, Brown and poor people through education, art, civil disobedience, advocacy and agriculture.